University of California regents agreed to pay $10 million to the former chairman of UCLA's orthopedic surgery department, who had alleged that the well-known medical school allowed doctors to take industry payments that may have compromised patient care. The settlement reached Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court came just before closing arguments were due to begin in a whistleblower-retaliation case brought by Dr. Robert Pedowitz, 54, a surgeon who was recruited to UCLA in 2009 to run the orthopedic surgery department.

Although some of the nation's healthcare issues are abstruse and vexing, others are relatively approachable. Many in this latter category fall within the province of the U.S. surgeon general. But the incumbent is nowhere to be found. The position of surgeon general is unusual in that it is considered prestigious but lacks virtually any budget, staff or programs of its own. The incumbent's achievements are the result of moral suasion and the careful selection of issues ? and sometimes a willingness to butt heads with the pols.

The National Rifle Assn. has a problem with Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy, President Obama's nominee for surgeon general, but it has nothing to do with Murthy's medical expertise. It's that Murthy thinks gun control is smart public health policy. Unfortunately, too many members of the Senate share the gun lobby's skewed view of the world, much to the detriment of the country and, it seems, to Murthy's chances of being confirmed. Murthy, an outspoken Obama supporter since before the 2008 election, earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard, an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a medical degree from the Yale School of Medicine; he teaches medicine at Harvard and is an attending physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston; he's served on a federal medical advisory board and is involved in medical nonprofit groups, all according to the White House.

Why do we have a surgeon general, and what does she do? According to John Parascandola, former historian of the U.S. Public Health Service, the office of the surgeon general has its origins in the Marine Hospital Service, a system funded by the federal government in 1798 to treat merchant seamen arriving in U.S. ports. In 1870, the federal government centralized the operation and tapped former Civil War surgeon Dr. John Maynard Woodworth to head the system as the supervising surgeon, a position that was later renamed surgeon general.

More than 100 health organizations and municipal public health departments, along with more than two dozen scientists, have asked the U.S. surgeon general to issue a report on sugar-sweetened soft drinks - akin to the landmark 1964 report on tobacco. “Soda and other sugary drinks are the only food or beverage that has been directly linked to obesity, a major contributor to coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers and a cause of psychosocial problems,” reads the letter, sent Thursday to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Richard Carmona, who served as U.S. surgeon general in George W. Bush's administration, announced Thursday that he will run as a Democrat for Arizona's open U.S. Senate seat. Carmona, who turns 62 this month, said in a statement that Washington is broken and that it was time "for honest people with real world experience to step forward. " "As a Special Forces medic in Vietnam, a trauma surgeon, and deputy sheriff in Arizona - we never had time for petty squabbles or gamesmanship - we had to work together to get results," he said in a statement.

A former Encino cosmetic surgeon was charged with involuntary manslaughter Tuesday for allegedly giving a toxic cocktail of drugs to a 61-year-old woman who died after a 10-hour liposuction operation. Ehab Alby Mohamed, 46, is expected to be arraigned Wednesday at the Van Nuys courthouse, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said. Mohamed is charged in the Aug. 21, 2010, death of Sharon Carpenter. DOCUMENTS: Read the state medical board suspension order and accusation She was was given a lethal mixture of lidocane, fentanyl and oxycodone during the procedure in Mohamed's Encino office, according to prosecutors.

The surviving victim of the Oregon mall shooting is awake and talking with her family, but is still in serious condition, a surgeon who treated her said Wednesday. Kristina Shevchenko, 15, had an assault rifle wound to her chest, a collapsed lung and was bleeding when she arrived at Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland on Tuesday, Dr. Laszlo Kiraly said at a news conference. Kiraly said that the teenager's injuries were more consistent with wounds found in the military or police force because of the blast impact the shooter's AR-15 semiautomatic rifle created.

Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland was a respected surgeon and bioethicist at Yale University and author of two modestly successful books when he was approached in the early 1990s by a young literary editor. The agent was looking for someone to write a book about what happens to the body and mind during the process of dying, and Nuland had been recommended to him. "I thought surely there were hundreds of books already" on the topic, Nuland later said, but the agent said there were not and encouraged him to check his libraries.

WASHINGTON - In recent years, the National Rifle Assn. has stepped into fights over judicial nominees it views as weak on 2nd Amendment rights, but its decision to oppose a surgeon general nominee takes the powerful lobby into new territory, expanding its campaign to a post that has no direct power to regulate guns. President Obama's nominee, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, a Massachusetts internist and former emergency room doctor, has called for more stringent gun laws. But he also testified at his Senate confirmation hearing last month that he would not use the surgeon general's office as a bully pulpit to push for them.

Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland was a respected surgeon and bioethicist at Yale University and author of two modestly successful books when he was approached in the early 1990s by a young literary editor. The agent was looking for someone to write a book about what happens to the body and mind during the process of dying, and Nuland had been recommended to him. "I thought surely there were hundreds of books already" on the topic, Nuland later said, but the agent said there were not and encouraged him to check his libraries.

Mike Garson obviously takes the piano very seriously, but he can chuckle over some of the contradictory paths that a versatile mastery of the keys has led him down. Maybe the unlikeliest of all is the one he's embarking on Saturday at Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, where he'll lead 44 instrumentalists, augmented by a 55-voice children's choir, in the premiere of his "Symphonic Suite for Healing. " Even an accomplished musician like Garson, who's best known as a key sideman during David Bowie's 1970s rise to superstardom but who usually plays jazz or a jazz-classical fusion when left to his own devices, can laughingly confess that what he's doing isn't brain surgery or as important as finding a cure for cancer.

WASHINGTON - President Obama's choice to become the next surgeon general spent much of his confirmation hearing Tuesday deflecting criticism from Republicans, who attacked him for his political activism, ties to the president and relative inexperience. Vivek Hallegere Murthy, who at 36 would be one of the youngest surgeon generals, was chided for advocating gun control in the aftermath of the December 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., and for backing the Affordable Care Act as a co-founder of Doctors for America, formerly Doctors for Obama.

The NBA's top players can be divided into three categories at next month's All-Star game: The West, the East and the creased. Several stars will be wearing freshly pressed suits as the result of injuries that have seemingly left no roster untouched. Derrick Rose, Brook Lopez and Al Horford have been sidelined for the rest of the season, and Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook and Kobe Bryant all hope to return within the next month. Dr. Riley J. Williams III, medical director for the Brooklyn Nets and sports medicine surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York (not to mention a lifelong Lakers fan who played football at Loyola High in Los Angeles)

January 17, 2014 | By Monte Morin, This post has been updated. See the note below for details.

The U.S. surgeon general is calling on Hollywood to kick the tobacco habit, saying too many youth-rated films contain harmful images of tobacco use. In a new report on smoking released Friday, acting Surgeon General Boris Lushniak and other U.S. health officials greatly expanded the list of tobacco's damaging health effects and urged renewed focus on reducing national smoking rates. Among dozens of findings and recommendations, the report found...

Timothy Jorden was well-known in the Buffalo, N.Y., area. His career began with a position as a weapons expert in the Army's Special Forces, included a stint as medic and eventually settled into civilian life as a respected physician and surgeon. But the former military man also had his demons, ones that chased him through a series of incidents -- including cases of domestic violence, police said. On Friday, Jorden's body was found in a heavily wooded area in Lake View, N.Y., part of the town of Hamburg outside of Buffalo.

The doctor who performed elbow surgery on Stephen Strasburg said he did not tell the Washington Nationals to shut down their ace pitcher. “I wasn't asked,” Dr. Lewis Yocum told the Los Angeles Times. Yocum said he had not talked with Nationals General Manager Mike Rizzo since last year and had not talked with Strasburg since spring training. The Nationals pulled the plug on Strasburg's season last week, ruling out the 24-year-old star from pitching in what almost certainly will be the first postseason appearance by a Washington baseball team since 1933.

USC will be constructing a new building for bioscience research, thanks in part to a $50-million gift from Gary K. Michelson, a retired orthopedic surgeon and inventor of spinal implants and other medical devices, the university is announcing Monday. The new, 190,000-square-foot USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience will house up to 30 labs investigating a range of biomedical topics. With groundbreaking expected later this year and completion in three years, it will be located at the southwest quadrant of the main campus south of downtown Los Angeles.